Clear Your Conscience: 4 Steps

step 3

Restore the universe

To clear your conscience, you have to compensate for your bad action with an inverse good one. If possible, do the opposite of your previous ill. For example, if you kicked the neighbor's dog, volunteer at the pound. However, should performing the inverse prove impractical, find some form of atonement that will at once satisfy this step without placing additional burdens on your conscience and causing you (or someone else) more trouble.

Revisiting Hamlet, the Danish prince bears a heavy conscience: Once he knows for certain that Claudius murdered his father, the ghosts of his conscience lean on him to atone for this misdeed, but they only offer him one path of atonement: vengeance. Kill Claudius. And you know how all that worked out too.

Your effort to restore the universe should be beneficial and selfless, not destructive.

step 4

Wash your hands… literally

Having atoned for your actions, clear your conscience and wash your hands. This is very obviously a ceremonial step, but it has its merit. According to a study by researchers in Toronto and Chicago, “Physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image.”

Literature’s most famous — and frustrated — hand-washer is Lady Macbeth. While sleepwalking, she’s plagued by her conscience and tries to wash the imaginary spots of King Duncan’s blood off her hands. The cursed woman fails, and her sleepy chattering outs herself and her husband as murderers.

This should surprise no one: She neglected to confront her misdeeds in honest language, she purged herself in a public and vocal manner, she made no attempt to restore the universe, and when she did wash her hands in a ceremonial manner, she neglected actual soap and water.